Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery

by Joseph Hansen

  13

  THE MEDALLION BUILDING on Wilshire was a sleek tower of glass and steel. On its tenth floor Dave used a slab door that had his name on it, trapped behind Plexiglas. The office he stepped into was wide. Its far wall was glass. A woven hanging covered another wall—rough, undyed wool yarns, earth colors, Norwegian. The chairs were slices of hide racked on frames of brushed steel. Two of them were goatskin, the fur on, white fur. Those were for visitors. Not that there were many visitors—he wasn't here that much. The chair back of the desk was saddle leather. The desk itself was oiled teak slabs in another brushed-steel framework.

  He liked it to be clear. He even kept the phone in a drawer. Now a stack of papers lay on it. Frowning, he let the door whisper shut behind him, crossed deep tobacco-color carpet to the desk. He sat down, put on the reading glasses, shuffled the papers. No problems. Routine. They only needed his initials. He slid open a silent drawer, took out a pen sheathed in rosewood, slender but heavy, twisted out the ballpoint, signed. This set, the next, the next. Old men dying. Old women dying. A child dying. Seven deaths since he'd been here last, day before yesterday.

  And in that time how many deaths had there been that didn't need his initials, that with all the initials in the world would pay no one in any terms but grief? He thought of Biafra. He thought of Southeast Asia. He thought of Ingalls moving gray and dutiful through that fine old house, to and from a rented hospital bed that held his maimed and fading wife, fetching this, taking that away—days, nights, months, years. Who could number the errands of mercy, the errands of despairing love? To what end? A red truck rattling off with the empty remnants of a life.

  He put the pen back, shut the shallow drawer, opened a deep drawer, took out the telephone. From his wallet he slipped a business card he'd picked up beside a rococo cash register yesterday. He punched a button on the phone and dialed the number on the card, a long number. As the ring signal repeated itself in his ear, the door opened. His father stood there, handsome, erect, white-haired. Dave threw him a quick smile, lifted his chin. Carl Brandstetter came in and moved to a wood-grained metal cabinet where bronze chrysanthemums stood in a flame-colored jar. He took from the cabinet a frosted pitcher, frosted glasses, ice cubes. He shut the top door, opened a lower one for gin, vermouth, olives. His white brows queried Dave. Dave nodded.

  "Oats and Norwood," the phone said in his ear.

  "David Brandstetter, Mrs. Oats," he said. "You were right: John Oats was an addict. I'm in your debt for telling me. He was getting morphine from a hospital orderly. What I need to know now is where the cash came from to pay for it. Prices run high."

  "Well, it certainly didn't come from me. He left me penniless. I always knew he would. Never get mixed up with a charmer, Mr. Brandstetter. It anesthetizes the instinct for self-preservation."

  "Last night you thought he'd left you twenty thousand dollars in life insurance."

  "You're wrong," she said. "I knew he'd written me off and written Peter in. I saw the papers from your company in his room at the hospital. But I never told Charles—I couldn't force myself. That was what upset me last night-the effect the news would have on Charles, the effect it did have. He aged ten years in that hour. All the hope went out of him."

  "I'm sorry," Dave said. "Let me understand this. He thought you'd get the money and invest it in the shop?"

  "He knows the shop is all I have. Twenty-five years of my life are in this shop. There'd have been nothing else for me to do."

  "Could he have been giving John Oats money?"

  Her laugh was harsh and humorless. "Oh, yes—yes, indeed. If he'd had anything left after what he'd paid John for his share in the business. But it so happens that Charles was the same sort of victim I was, Peter was, even April Stannard was—though I'm not about to waste sympathy on her. Charles had given all there was to give right at the start."

  "John Oats asked Dwight Ingalls for money."

  "Who told you?" She asked it sharply.

  "Ingalls. He's got problems of his own-or had at the time. But he gave what he could spare. I found out about him through a telephone bill. Another long-distance number was on that bill. I wonder if you can tell me whose it is." He gave it to her.

  "Sam Wald." She sounded thoughtful. "A writer. Not of books. Films. Television."

  "Thank you," Dave said. "Any word from Peter?"

  "If word comes from Peter, it won't come to me."

  "That's what they all say. All right, Mrs. Oats. Later." He hung up, got out of the chair, took one of the two icy little glasses off the cabinet as he passed, sipped from it as he went to the door, opened the door. "Miss Taney. Find me the address in Hollywood of Sam Wald. If it's not in the book, try the Screen Writers' Guild. Lay on all the credentials. If they still won't give you the address, tell them you've got a big dividend check for him. That will tug at their heartstrings. It always does. Do it now, please." He let the door close.

  "I'd hoped you'd have lunch with me." His father sat easy in one of the goatskin chairs, martini on the floor at his handsomely shod feet. From a flat red-and-white box he took a brown cigarette. He slid the box away and used a gold butane lighter to start the smoke. "I'd like you to meet a very lovely young lady."

  "I'll bet she is," Dave said. "They always are. But I have to see a man about a murder."

  "To serve the ends of logic"—Carl Brandstetter picked up his drink—"it has to have been the son. I've never known you to get sidetracked."

  "The tracks in this case meander. And there are a lot of them." Dave went back to the desk to put the phone away. "But my hunch is that if I follow them far enough they'll all end up at a place called Arena Blanca on a rainy night when a man went into the ocean and didn't come back anymore." He sat on a corner of the desk and lit a cigarette. "Nanette won't spot you at lunch with love's young dream?"

  His father smiled. "Nanette is in residence in Reno." The smile became a wince. "All expenses paid."

  "Why not be smart?" Dave said. "Save money. Don't marry this one." He took another swallow of his drink, trying to tot up exactly how many stepmothers there'd been in the forty-five years since he'd howled his first protest at life. They shifted in and out of focus—a face, a voice, a name, a scent of soap, the taste of a certain supper, a warm Coke at a dusty country filling station, laughter, a slap. His own mother was less than these, not even a snapshot, merely a name on a marriage license dated 1922, turning brown at the edges. He'd found it at age nine when he'd dropped a heavy carton of stuff from his father's desk during a move and it had blown with other papers across a lawn. He'd worn it inside his shirt for weeks and cried over it when he was alone, imagining he missed her. He'd been sulky and savage to his father and to the bewildered girl who was his lost mother's third replacement, a breasty, wide-eyed blonde child who lived in a pink kimono stitched with a pale-green dragon and in a haze of Turkish cigarette smoke. 1932. He'd grown tired of mourning someone he'd never known and put the paper away. He still had it somewhere. He didn't know why. What was his father saying now? That this girl was different.

  "I'm aware I've made mistakes—nine of them, to be brutally exact. But even I can learn, given a few decades and sufficient humiliation."

  "I hope you're right." Dave gave him a level smile. "You know how much I hope that."

  His father rose. "You could come meet her. You'd see. She's very wonderful. You'd like her."

  "That would make her different," Dave said.

  His father set his glass on the cabinet. Some of the crysanthemums straggled. He frowned and worked at straightening them. "You liked Lisa." He said it without emphasis. Dave stared at him.

  Lisa's name hadn't come up between them in more than twenty years. Yes, he'd liked her. Too much, as it turned out. His father had resented the way young Dave ignored Barbara, Susan, Ruth. But when the boy had taken to Lisa—she was nineteen, Dave only two years younger—he'd resented that no less. For once he'd chosen a girl with more than looks—with brains and background. Her f
ather had been a high-court judge in Germany. Till the Nazis shot him. Dave couldn't recall now what had happened to Lisa's mother. Her two brothers had tried to leave Germany and failed. Only she had escaped. There was mournfulness to her dark beauty. But her smile was radiant. So was her mind. And she'd been someone in his own house at last to whom he could talk about books and music, painting and theatre—things that made a difference to him.

  Thinking back on it now, maybe there'd been some justice to his father's jealousy. Maybe Dave had been half in love with her. He still remembered with good warmth their jaunts to the old museum in Exposition Park, to the sleepy white rooms of the Huntington Library, to organ recitals in the gray towering hollowness of a cold downtown church, to chamber-music concerts in a bare wooden hall in a west-side park where a beaky, balding Igor Stravinsky had sometimes twitched a baton-all of which Carl Brandstetter had made it plain bored him. So that the two youngsters had taken to going alone. And to political meetings that wouldn't have bored his father but would have angered him.

  Then there'd been a little café not far from his school where he and Lisa had sometimes met for lunch—strong farmhouse coffee, the good smell of newly baked bread, rain on a steamy windowpane. Had they met that way often? Too often, he guessed. Yet, of course, he'd been no threat to his father. Even if Lisa had been capable of unfaithfulness, and she wasn't, he had no use for girls sexually. But his father didn't know that. If Dave had worked up the nerve to tell him, would the marriage to Lisa have lasted? Possibly. He hadn't found the nerve, though. Not till after the war, when Lisa was gone and forgotten with the rest.

  He said now, "Is she like Lisa?"

  His father's smile was thin. "As like Lisa as your Mr. Sawyer is like Rod.''

  "Externals." Dave shrugged and finished his drink. "Dangerously deceptive." He got off the desk corner.

  His father paused with his glass lifted, frowning, pretending concern. "Something wrong there?"

  "Some confusion about who's dead and who's alive. But if it can be straightened out, I'll straighten it."

  "You could let it go," his father said.

  "That's your style"—Dave peered into the martini pitcher— "not mine." He tilted the over his father's glass, over his own. It measured out exactly.

  "He working yet?" Carl Brandstetter asked.

  "The offers have all been for overseas posts. Too secret to discuss. But—at least until this morning—he didn't want to go overseas again."

  His father started to ask something and stopped because Miss Taney opened the door. For sixty years Miss Taney had maintained inside a body like an assemblage of bleached sticks the spirit of a nerve-shattered girl of five. Her mouth never stopped trembling. Her eyes were wide with fright. She delivered all messages in a kind of whispered shriek. The more so now, in the awesome presence of Carl Brandstetter, managing director and chairman of the board.

  "Excuse me. Mr. Sam Wald is no longer a member of the Screen Writers' Guild, but they gave me his address, just as you said they would." She held out a memo in a blue-veined hand that shook.

  "Thank you," Dave said. "You can take those forms."

  She took them and fled.

  14

  THE STREET WAS a curved cement shelf, walled on one side by white buildings, Mediterranean style, and on the other by high curbs topped with railings of thick iron pipe. The drop off the curbs was twenty feet straight down to the red tile roofs of identical houses, another curved shelf of street, and more red roofs below that, among the sun-crested tops of reaching palms. Up here there wasn't bare earth enough to yield much greenery. Plantings ran to clumps of spiky Spanish bayonet and stunted banana trees in the jogs of long white stairways.

  Sam Wald's front door had sometime been enameled black, but the coating had seamed and scaled off in places. Dave tried a black bell push. It didn't seem to work. There was a stingy black iron knocker. He rapped that. At the end of the red tile landing a fat gray striped cat woke from sleep in a patch of sun, stretched, sat, began to wash. She reminded Dave of Tatiana, his and Rod's old cat. A little window back of iron grillwork in the door opened. A bloodshot eye looked out.

  "David Brandstetter," he told the eye. "Death-claims division, Medallion Life Insurance Company. It's about John Oats, the bookseller. He's dead."

  The voice that answered was raspy and defeated. Like a fan's who's cheered fourteen innings for the team that lost. "I thought death was supposed to be the end."

  "Somebody wanted it to be," Dave said. "I'd like to know who. He was in touch with you. Maybe you can help me."

  "I can't help myself." But a spring lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door opened. The man who opened it was short and pudgy. He wore a brindled gray track suit made for someone no taller but a lot thinner, maybe a Sam Wald of thirty years ago. The shirt pulled up. The pants couldn't meet it. A bulge of lardy belly showed. The suit needed washing. Stained deck shoes matched it. No socks. Crusty ankles. Four days of stubble blacked Wald's jowls. He hadn't combed what was left of his hair. His lips were dry and cracked. He moistened them with a gray tongue and squinted gummy eyes against the slant of afternoon sun. He croaked:

  "All right. What the hell. Come in." He shrugged, flopped his hands, turned away. "Excuse how the place looks. Busy. No time. Can't afford a cleaning woman. Can't afford anything anymore. Can't pay the rent. That's who I thought you were. The landlord. Lived here three years. Son of a bitch won't trust me for a lousy month."

  Dave saw why when he shut the door and stepped down out of the hall. The room had space and a beautiful shape. Parquetry floor. Rococo Louis Quinze chairs and sofas, good copies. No one cared anymore. No one had cared for quite a while. Dirty laundry strewed the Aubusson carpet, the petit-point of footstools. On delicate gilt-and-white tables stood open soup cans, bean cans, contents half eaten, sprouting mold. Cloisonne and Meissen were lost among crumpled potato-chip bags, soggy milk cartons, driedout wedges of pizza, chewed, forgotten. On a white plaster mantel an ormolu clock had stopped, as if frightened by an ambush of empty vodka bottles. The smell was of decay.

  "I had two Oscar nominations." Wald picked his way through the wreckage, heading for a short curve of steps with lacy iron rails. A dirty shirt hung off a finial. He picked it up, looked at it as if he didn't know what it was, dropped it. "But do you think I can sell a script today? Can't even get an agent."

  Dave followed him up the stairs. In the room at the top a handsome period desk held a big electric typewriter. Its motor pulsed softly. Rolled around its platen was a half-typed page. A sheaf of typed pages lay next to the machine. There were also a fifth of supermarket vodka, a punctured can of Treesweet orange juice, a thumb-smudged tumbler holding what was probably a mixture of the two. There were paperback books. Wald picked up one of these, his mouth puckered in disgust.

  "So look what I'm writing now." He held the book out. Dave took it, found his reading glasses. On the book's cover was a color photo of two girls in black lace bras and panties, kneeling on a couch, taking the pants off a sallow young man with a mustache. "Porn. Cheap porn. It's not even a living. But-I'm working my way up. They paid me eight-fifty for the first one. I'm on my fourth. That'll get me an even thousand. Just one trouble. They don't go any higher. They want product. To get it, they've got to keep you hungry. Nobody who wasn't starving would write this shit."

  He took back the book, dropped it on the desk, dropped himself into the carved, gilded chair that faced the Olivetti. "I had years when I made a hundred thousand. A decade when I never made less than fifty." His hand went mechanically to the glass that held more than orange juice. While he sucked up half the mixture, he glowered at the words in the typewriter. He set the glass down, put his stubby fingers on the keys and machine-gunned a sentence. "Sickening," he said.

  "You'd have to do one a week," Dave said. "Can you do one a week?"

  "It's not a question of 'can,' " Wald said, and finished what was in the glass and picked up the bottle with one hand, the tin of orange ju
ice with the other, and poured the glass full again.

  Dave said, "It might be easier without the booze."

  "Without the booze it would be impossible." Wald looked past Dave. "What do you want?"

  A woman who was very thin stood in an archway up two steps. Her soiled lavender wrapper didn't cover her breasts well. They were full, rounded, like fine fruit on a dying tree. Her skin was corpse white, almost luminous. Her eyes were very large and took color from the dye of the wrapper. The only makeup she wore was liner around those eyes. She clutched under her arm a little stringy-haired, taffy-color dog.

  "He wants to go out." Her voice was deep, the diction stagy. It made the speech sound like a quote from Antigone. One of the more tragic lines. Dave guessed he'd seen her. In a film. Or maybe more than one. She'd had more weight then, but the bones were what made her beautiful and the bones were even more in evidence now. Her hair was cropped. There would be wigs someplace down the hall behind her. If she wore one for a minute, he'd be able to put a name to her. A moderately famous name, he thought. "I can't take him," the ravaged voice said. "I'm not dressed."

  "Get dressed," Wald said. "I'm busy."

  "Take him out!" she screamed, and threw the little dog at him. It hit the floor skidding with a terrified scrabble of claws. It came against the wall with a yelp and cringed there, shivering, eyes sparks of fear behind a streaky straggle of hair. Dave looked back at the archway. The woman had gone. Back to her amphetamines, no doubt. Wald hadn't moved. He sat staring at the words in the typewriter again.

  "Is there a leash?" Dave went to the little dog, knelt, reached out a slow hand.

  Wald sounded dazed. "What?" The chair legs scraped the floor. He got to his feet with a sour sigh. "Yeah, yeah. There's a leash. But you don't have to take him. Why the hell should you have to take him?"

  "You're busy," Dave said. The dog shrank back into a corner, whimpering. He touched its head, small, delicate as a Sevres teacup. He gently scratched the silky ears. The dog quivered, but it didn't snap. It let him pick it up. "Where do I find the leash?"